Digital Marketing Communications techniques

Online customer acquisition techniquesJuly 29, 2014

4 Steps to creating a plan for online customer acquisition

Having a digital marketing strategy for your organisation is essential to ensure your marketing activities are supporting specific marketing objectives. The rise in the number of different digital channels available to target your customer base continues to grow as shown by this BIG list of todays customer acquisition channels by David Sealey, so withough without a sound framework in place to manage, monitor and measure organisation performance, not having a digital communications plan could prove disastrous.

In a previous post, I provided an actionable plan to help create a retention strategy using key digital tactics. Retention by its definition is ‘maintaining or preserving your existing customer base loyal to your product offering.

This post will is an introduction to creating an outline framework to create a plan for online customer acquisition techniques - defined as tactics to help drive traffic or generating a lead or purchase through a website.

Acquisition techniques

This framework has been divided into 5 key sections:

1. What’s your position in the market?

Before launching your acquisition strategy, it’s important to assess where your organisation is within it’s sector. You should already have a wealth of analytical insights on key metrics and have access to key performance measures on how your digital channels are performing.

Below are a few other areas to consider.

What’s your Unique Selling Point? Do you have a strapline and how does your business use this to differentiate itself within the market? How is the company defined online and how are you perceived by customers (existing, past) and suppliers?

Know your audience - Who is your target audience? Create a profile of who your target customer is and how they currently interact with your brand online. Web analytics and historic sales data should be a useful source of information to understand who your customers are, geography, products sold, repeat visit rate and purchase patterns

Know your competitors - Do you have a defined list of competitors within your market? Are you analysing their performance and tracking their activity? It’s essential you are building up a profile of who they are, how they interact with the market and their own USP’s or differentiators e.g. do they opt for price-driven strategies, PR-driven activity, etc

To build any successful strategy, it’s important objectives are laid out in what you are looking to achieve and why. To make these realistic, I’d recommend they’re created using the SMART approach (Specific, Measureable, Attainable, Realistic and Timely).

As mentioned in section 1, having an understanding of ‘What your current position is within the market’ will help you create and define a picture of the current position and areas to focus your strategy - here is an example of an acquisition based objective:

‘Increase website visits by 10% during the period of June – August 2013 compared to same period of the previous year measured through Google Analytics’.

Source: www.smartinsights.com

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